Lecture 5-1: Jesus' Method — Calling, Presence, Sending, and Correction

Mark 3:13-19 (World English Bible):

3.1 Four verbs, one verse

Mark 3:13-14 packs the whole cycle this lecture argues for into a single sentence. Jesus "called to himself those whom he wanted" — the initiative and the selection are his, not a response to volunteers. He "appointed twelve" — a formal, named commissioning, not a loose association of admirers. The purpose clause that follows has two halves joined by "and": "that they might be with him, and that he might send them out to preach." Those two halves are not equally weighted by accident of grammar; they are sequential in the only sense that matters for formation — presence has to happen for sending to mean anything more than an assignment handed to a stranger.

Luke's account of the same appointment (Luke 6:12-16) adds that Jesus "continued all night in prayer to God" before making the choice. Whatever else that detail means for the doctrine of Jesus' own dependence on the Father, it also means the twelve names that follow were not efficient picks from an applicant pool. Leadership development, on this text's own terms, starts before the leaders-to-be are even in the room.

3.2 Presence: the un-glamorous middle stage

"That they might be with him" is the stage most development processes shortchange, because it produces nothing that shows up on a report. The Gospels do not record a curriculum for this stage; they record Jesus doing ordinary things — traveling, eating, being asked questions late at night, being interrupted by crowds — with twelve men watching him do it. Mark 4:34 notes that "privately to his own disciples he explained all things," a habit of unpacking in small-group intimacy what had just been said in public. The content of that unpacking is rarely given in detail; the fact of its happening, repeatedly, is what Mark records.

A. B. Bruce's The Training of the Twelve (1871), still read for this reason more than a century later, treats this stage as the center of Jesus' pedagogy rather than a preamble to it: the disciples were not so much taught a doctrine as immersed in a person, and the content they eventually preached (Acts 4:13's observation that the Jewish leaders "perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men" but "took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus") is credited to that exposure specifically, not to formal instruction. Robert E. Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism (1963) makes the same observation from a different angle, arguing that Jesus' method inverts the modern instinct to reach the largest audience first and disciple later — Jesus spent a disproportionate share of a short public ministry on twelve men precisely because a method that produces reproducing leaders has to be slower and more concentrated than a method that only produces an audience.

This is a place where a caution is worth stating plainly rather than assumed: "being with him" was not idle companionship. It included correction, rebuke (Mark 8:33), and confrontation with the disciples' own ambition (Mark 9:33-35, 10:35-41) — the presence stage is where the friction that later produces a formed leader actually happens, not a soft stage before the real training starts.

3.3 Sending: authority given before mastery is demonstrated

Mark 3:14-15 gives the Twelve authority "to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons" as part of the same appointment that sends them to preach. Luke 9:1-6 and Luke 10:1-20 record two actual sendings — the Twelve, then a wider seventy(-two) — with specific instructions about what to carry, where to stay, and how to respond to rejection. The striking feature, easy to read past, is how early this happens. These are men who have not yet seen the crucifixion, do not yet understand the resurrection, and in Peter's case will shortly rebuke Jesus for predicting his own death (Mark 8:32) and be rebuked in turn. Jesus sends them anyway.

This matters for a theology of leadership development because it resists a common but unbiblical instinct: that authority should be withheld until a leader-in-training has become fully mature, fully doctrinally settled, fully safe to deploy. Jesus' pattern is closer to supervised risk than to sequestered preparation — real authority, real responsibility, and real potential for the sending to go wrong, all under the eye of a leader who is still present enough to correct it.

3.4 Correction: the stage that closes the loop

The cycle does not end at sending. Luke 9:37-42 records a sending that fails in public: the disciples cannot cast out a spirit from a boy, and Jesus, arriving to a crowd and an argument, both performs the deliverance and diagnoses the failure to the disciples privately afterward (Mark 9:28-29 — "This kind can come out by nothing, save by prayer"). Luke 10:17-20 records the opposite case, a sending that succeeds too well in the disciples' own estimation — they return "with joy" over their authority over demons — and Jesus corrects the emphasis rather than the outcome: "don't rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." Both corrections happen only because Jesus is still present when the sent-out disciples return; a leader who sends and does not remain reachable for the return trip cannot supply this stage at all.

3.5 The cycle repeats

Nothing in the Gospels suggests this is a one-time sequence completed and then left behind. The Twelve are called, kept present, sent, and corrected — and then kept present again, sent again, corrected again — across the length of Jesus' ministry, culminating in the final commissioning of Matthew 28:18-20, which is itself another "sending" issued to men who have, by that point, been through the cycle multiple times and failed inside it more than once (not least at Gethsemane, Mark 14:50). The method does not graduate its participants out of correction; it keeps returning them to presence even after real responsibility has been given, which is a claim this course will return to directly in Chapter 12's treatment of ongoing mentoring rather than one-time discipleship events.

The cycle repeats: correction returns a leader to renewed presence, not to a finished file.